When the boosts were made about a year ago, pretty much 95% of the game was just theory in the way that it hadn't been tested. The general idea of leadership balancing was a rather simple one. I'll try to formulate it in a couple of theses.
1: The points spent in CH to raise boost effectiveness should correlate to what you would have gained if you invested those points in another stat. It's easy to balance for Hit points, not so much for fire damage.
2: Leadership should let you specialize while sacrificing all-around protection/effectiveness. By concentrating the strenghts of your characters in certain directions, you leave gaps in other departments.
3: Since boosts are only active when;
- there is a leader online
- he is alive
- he has picked boosts that are actually useful to you
it has to be taken into consideration in point 1, thus the high numbers. Risk->reward
it was also conceived that;
- Major, organized teams would specialize and adapt their builds to it, making it part of the meta.
- Teams making proper use of leadership should have a big advantage over teams not doing so.
Apart from that, I gladly admit that some of the numbers could use some tweaking. Due to an internal mistake and apparently not enough motivation to go fix it, the applied boost calculation and its relation to CH was supposed to have diminishing returns, which it doesn't right now.
However, what I hoped not to see, though knowing that it was inevitable, is that people would complain about its strenghts without trying to exploit its weaknesses.
The way I would define something as being "OP", there would have to be a practical situation where the only way to counter a certain leadership setup was to use the exact same setup in order to negate it. However, until proven otherwise, I will say that every leadership setup and its implication can be countered by means other than using the same strategy. For example, if the enemy repeatedly uses +hp, +dr and +crit ag, they will not only be just as vulnerable to every other damage type than normal, but the very nature of stat points is to have a number of different effects which doesn't apply to CH. By putting 9 points into CH, players will have
- less bleed resistance
- less critical special
Because those two stats are spread out all across the SPECIAL.
In the above example, we have a lot fo room to figure out further weaknesses;
- If the required stat points are taken from PE, IN orLK, that team will have diminished sniping capabilities, which could be abused depending on the map. Especially when taking the lack of bleed and critical special into account I just noted.
- If the required stat points have been pulled out of ST and EN, it could again be abused by using critical effects that roll against those 2 stats. Crippling, limb shredder, Frag grenades and mines come to mind. Logically, since the stats are neither in ST nor EN, they would have to be in the sniper-stats. If it not happens that the enemy is msotly using snipers, one could try to force them into a close range battle.
Now on top of that, one could even counter leadership with leadership directly by using the 2 bleed related boosts, which apply not only to sg snipers, but certain other weapons like rippers and barbed spears as well. When exploiting bleed, poison comes to mind as it further lowers bleed resistance. While the game could still need some help in that department by increasing the means to apply bleed with gas grenades and special ammunition, even right now this could be executed with throwing characters.
In the end, AoP is a very young game and it will take time until a core playerbase will have developed and we see how the game is really played by the players. I don't think that 2238 devs in 2008 planned their games around rapetrains and lsw sneaks and taxi chars and mutie airstrikes and whatever else the players went on to do with what they found inside the game. While it's easy to criticize a dev for seemingly trying to tell the players how to play his own game and in egocentrical shame denying to accept reality, I can only do my best in supplying the players with alternatives and options. And unless those resources are not exhausted, I see no reason to implement fundamental changes.
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Topic: Nerf modules (Read 21903 times)